Going for the most cynical reading award...

My impression is that Microsoft the software developer is not in favour of Software patents,
since for anyone doing programming they represent at best a legal minefield. However,
Microsoft has a large legal department, which gets to draft all its license agreements, and to
make public statements about Microsoft policy. For such a department Software patents are an
empire building opportunity, each new threat must be countered by hiring more lawyers, who
report to Microsoft's head attorney, making him more important and powerful (and perhaps
richer too). He has personally and in his role at Microsoft expressed strong support for such
patents and for any other expansion in "intellectual property" using a variation of the broken
window fallacy to justify them as economically positive.

With Ballmer in control rather than Gates I'd say the emphasis on software development is
over, and Microsoft has matured into a more typical company where the executives have a very
limited grip on the nature of the company's core activities. Such a company is much more
likely to use Software patents as a weapon, but correspondingly less likely to be able use
this threat effectively. Actual patent lawsuits from Redmond would be a sign of weakness and
should elicit cheers from everyone in the Free Software camp except the people whose doormats
they actually land on.

I think it was more accurate to view BG's viewpoint as (paraphrasing, of course):
"If people knew then what they know now about software and patents then they could of shutdown
software development as we currently know it. There is a distinct chance that a software
company can patent something fundamental about software and we would be at their mercy.
Therefore we need to get as many patents as possible."


That was more or less what was said in a 1991 'Challenges and Strategy' memo BG sent out to
the rest of the corporation. You can find the full text at:
http://www.bralyn.net/etext/literature/bill.gates/challen...
And see exactly what he said. The relevent text is about 2/3rds toward the bottom in the
"Catagory 3" section.


The thing about software vs other industry is the low overhead of praticipation. With the
automobile industry, for example, you need to have millions ontop of millions of dollars in up
front expenses to produce a car. You need to obtain suppliers, third party distributers,
entire manufacturing plants, engineers, lawyers, artists, assembly line workers, etc etc.

With software all you need to write industry software is intellegence and a PC. Your looking
at 1/10000th the expense of praticipation. And OSS's goal in life is to make it cheaper,
easier, to make software. A decade ago the cost to obtain enterprise-level development
environment would be much more the cost of any computer. Now though you can get the source
code to entire operating systems and some of the best development tools in the world for Free,
all you need is a fast internet connection.

So for a large software company this puts you in a very vunerable position, long term. Novell,
SCO, Microsoft, etc etc, this does not matter. A small, very smart, and very agressive company
with only a few hundred employees would be able to take any one of those companies out,
theoreticly.  So with software patents, since they cost so much in terms of overhead to obtain
and patent agreements with other large software companies; this provides a very strong buffer
against competition from small companies.

So with a company in Microsoft's position you have no choice but to be on the side of software
patents, even though you regularly get nailed by them to the tune of several million dollars
every year by patent trolls. Your investors will not let you do anything else. They are the
ones in control and you have no choice but to cater to them.

The ultimate danger though is to the entire U.S.A. software industry. Smaller countries just
now entering into the 'information technology' era will probably realise that software patents
are a barrier to them and thus refuse to support them. Without the legal overhead these
countries will be able to let their own companies do software development without these
limitations. Once these companies get bigger then they would be able to go into the USA and
other software patent-friendly countries and just start using their own innovations to get
thousands of patents which they would use to attack companies like Microsoft, furthur limiting
their ability to compete. They wouldn't even have to do it with their own legal teams... There
are lots of patent troll corporations that would be happy to get their hands on a bunch of new
software patents to begin extracting licensing fees from rich software companies on some
foreign company's behalf.